


Los Dias de Los Muertos

by Inspirationstrikes09



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8325769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inspirationstrikes09/pseuds/Inspirationstrikes09
Summary: Maya Jimenez is living a normal life as a community college student in Elko, Nevada when the Zombie Apocalypse hits. Now she must learn to survive in a world where everything, including some of her fellow human beings, wants her dead. She's never thought of herself as particularly strong, but she will have to be stronger than everything set against her now. Can she adjust to the new normal in time?





	1. Chapter 1

Maya’s first clue that the world was ending was a police chase down her street. Things like police chases just did not happen on her street, it was one of the reasons she’d moved there in the first place. She lived on Copper Street in the Monte Carlo Apartments, and the most interesting thing she’d seen so far in the three months she’d lived there was one of the older ladies, crouched on the sidewalk in front of her apartment with a can of cat food and a flyswatter.  
The chase happened during the second week of October, when things would have disintegrated in the bigger cities already. Maybe if she had been the kind of person who checks news sites online every morning, instead of catching her news from memes on Facebook it wouldn’t have been such a shock. But maybe it still would have. It all happened so fast.  
The memory came with incredible detail. She was in her tiny living room that night, ignoring her homework to Google gardening tips for high desert climate on her phone and eating some soup, grimacing at the metallic aftertaste but too lazy to get up and make something else. When she heard sirens blaring of course the only thing to do was go over to the window to see what was going on. Anything is better than studying. She saw this screaming human shape sprinting down the street, being followed by what she was fairly certain was a man, dressed in a nice, dark suit.  
It was impossible to tell if she knew the person who was running away, they were moving so fast and it was so dark. Someone must have called the police to help him or her because as they came down the street the first cars came screaming around the corner just behind them.   
Her feet were cold on the gray linoleum, the ugly brown curtains flashed with a blinding kaleidoscope of red/blue making it even harder to see what was going on, but Pero que pedo?….. she remembered thinking with surprise, something is seriously wrong with that guy.  
Something was wrong. He was chasing the other person with what looked like as much speed as he could. But it was a jerky disconnected movement; weaving and bobbing across the street and very slow. He looked like someone trying to pretend they’re running in movie slow motion when they’re drunk.  
And she remembered horror when the police car didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down as it hit the man in the suit halfway down the block with a thick, meaty thud. The person he was chasing didn’t turn around, just disappeared around the end of her building still going full out, too breathless to keep screaming.  
The sick guy went flying, skidding farther down the street leaving a dark wet smear, landing all splayed out at really awkward angles. She thought He’s dead. He has to be dead. There’s no way—what just happened?! There were other people at their windows, neighbors she hadn’t even talked to yet, now just scared, pale faces watching this insane police brutality out of their windows like she was.  
It got more insane when the dead guy got up, turned, and jerked back towards the police car that had hit him. It had a dent in the front, and it didn’t seem to be able to move. Maybe it damaged something, hitting a person.  
This crazy guy punched through the windshield, of course he did, he was infected. The officer fired through the shattered glass, she remembered hearing at least three shots, but it was too dark for her to see where or if he got hit. He--it--dragged out the poor lady inside and started….gnawing. It wasn’t pleasant. She sincerely wished she couldn’t remember that part with so much detail, but she did; especially now after seeing it happen to people she loved.   
The officer only got off one more shot that seemed to veer off wildly into the sky. No training course could prepare you for something like that.  
More cars had screeched up right behind her, and the other officers opened fire. The officer getting eaten died right away. She hoped so anyway. She stopped screaming, at least. The infected man did a crazy, jolting dance, pushed away from his meal as all the bullets hit him; and then one got him in the head and he hit the street hard.  
Backing away from the window her hands were shaking and ice cold and she felt ready to throw up. TV does not prepare you for seeing something like that for real, right there in front of you, and horror movies had never been her favorites in the first place. She felt light headed, and she had to sit down.  
Flashes of it kept replaying; the crunching thud of the guy getting hit, the sprinkle of falling windshield, the gooey blood that hung in strings from his mouth as he munched away on the poor lady cop….and she had to run to the bathroom to puke the soup out.   
When she finished rinsing her mouth out in the sink she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her light olive skin looked even paler than usual, and her dark brown eyes were still wide with terror. She lifted her hands up to hold them out level in front of her and watched them shake with a vague fascination. She couldn’t stop them trembling. The front door was already locked and chained, thank God; she probably couldn’t have managed it with such shaky hands.  
The cop cars were gone when she got out of the bathroom and the bodies as well. Somehow it made her feel even less safe to see the empty street with its glittering puddle of glass fragments to remind her of what had happened.   
The rest of that night she lay awake in her bed, unaware that it was only the first of many sleepless nights. Mostly because she couldn’t bear to put on a light and let…anything…know someone was home, and trying to sleep in the dark after something like that is guaranteed to keep you awake.  
Instead of sleeping her mind kept trying to think back, to anything she had seen or heard that might have prepared her for this. A news story had been playing in the background last week when she treated herself to McDonald's after school. She had barely paid attention, since it had nothing to do with her and it seemed like new epidemic scares were going around all the time. Now she wished she had at least watched it.  
This story was unusual, because the details were really sketchy. Just that people were getting sick somewhere in Florida, and had to go into quarantine. She had thought that if there were no details, and no symptoms, how was anyone supposed to know if they had it or not? Later she thought that the newscasters hadn’t been told what the symptoms were. It was pretty scary, after all.  
One part of that story had really stuck out, about a sick person biting the doctor who tried to treat him. How out-of-your-mind sick would you have to be to actually bite someone? Thinking back, jumping at every little sound in the dark of her still unfamiliar bedroom, she remembered some things going around Facebook for a few days. There had been a lot of memes that week, more funny than scary. But she’d only seen those bits and pieces while she tried to keep up with much more important things like classes and making sure she had enough money left over from her school grants to fill up her tank to drive home to Las Vegas for winter break. Looking back, it was easier to see why everything seemed to have disintegrated so fast. Elko is so isolated, only one major highway running through and you need other infected people to get the whole thing started. However they got there, THEIR craziness was already well advanced in other, larger areas and Elko seemed to go from normal to wasteland almost instantly. Finally, after the sun came up the next morning she dozed off, and when she woke up it was mid afternoon.


	2. Chapter 2

That whole first day she stayed in her apartment, not daring to go outside, not daring to sleep again that night. She had enough food in the fridge to last for a while if she didn’t mind some weird combinations, and there were still canned foods, crackers and junk in her small pantry.   
The water stayed on, and the electricity was still working as well…but she couldn’t bring herself to turn on any lights at night. She was terrified that something would notice her and some deep instinct told her that getting noticed was a very bad idea. She was like a terrified animal, crouching motionless in its burrow in the hopes that death will pass it by.  
There wasn’t much going on directly outside her window, but she saw lots of people with things strapped to their car’s luggage racks the first part of the day, heading towards I-80. Occasionally she saw the smoke from distant fires, and once she heard sirens. It was luck that none of the fires spread to her street because by the end of the day the sirens had stopped, and she never saw a fire truck going by. There was plenty of smoke.  
Most of that day she tried over and over again to call her parents and little brother. She checked Facebook almost obsessively, Googled Las Vegas news until the internet stopped connecting. There was nothing, or at least, nothing newer than the week before. The amount of people on Facebook surprised Maya, but all of them were useless, panicked, full of crazy rumors rather than any kind of facts, looking desperately for family or friends, on and off at completely random times.  
THEY must have already happened in Vegas, but why hadn’t her parents called? An extremely bad sign if they didn’t have time to call. If they were trying to escape to Elko, thinking her more remote area was safe, they weren’t making it. Interstate 15 was probably choked with refugees, blocked with crashes, a chaotic mess of healthy and sick all trying to move at the same time.  
Whatever had happened, their home phone was never answered and their cell phones went straight to voicemail. Not knowing was torture. Not knowing meant she could hope they were just holed up somewhere, alive and uninfected like her, but she still had to wonder if they had already turned into something like the man in the nice suit last night.  
Her brother would have graduated high school next June and he had been planning to move up with her and get a job until he had enough money for his own place. She wished he had already graduated, she would know he was fine if he was with her. Moving up here to rural Nevada after her graduation in June was starting to seem like a worse and worse idea every hour. Being rebellious and independent just seemed like a good way to get herself killed, now that she was looking out her window at the dark stain where some crazy evil infected thing had slid down the road before munching on the cop sent to stop it.   
Even her mom, who could and had brought up every possible thing that could happen to poor stupid girls living far away from their loving and much smarter parents, hadn’t thought of this particular scenario when she had been coming up with reasons why Maya should stay in Las Vegas for school. And now Maya had no one. No one to exchange ideas about what was happening, what to do, where to go. Being alone was paralyzing.  
After that terrifying day she figured out that she was going to have to do something besides hide. She had already seen one or two of THEM, walking with curiously erratic steps down the street, just wandering aimlessly. Already she knew enough for her heart to turn to ice at the sight of that jerky walk. Being in an upstairs apartment and never putting on a light or making loud noise must have been what saved her. Instead of sleeping that night, she barricaded the door with her old, broken couch and tried to make a plan. 

Late the next morning after a bit of restless sleep she dug out the last of her lunch meat and slapped it on some bread with mayonnaise, cucumbers and some Tajin, wondering morbidly if it was the last food she would ever taste. Today would be dangerous, and she knew it.  
She crept down the stairs and out to her car, jumping at every little sound, the pack on her back full of what was left of the non-perishable food she’d had in the house, all three of her water bottles full, a can opener, a couple changes of clothes, and her cell phone and charger.  
What else were you supposed to take? What did you need to drive through a real life apocalypse? She didn’t even have a weapon. Now was not the time to regret that she’d always thought those doomsday preppers were nuts. If any of them were still alive, they would have taken great delight in telling her exactly where her preparations were wrong. The thought was not comforting.  
She looked up and down the street half a dozen times before she could convince herself that nothing was in sight and her hands were shaking as she tried to get the key into the door lock. She jumped in and slammed the door quickly, and then an awful thought made her heart slam into her throat. What if there was one hiding in the back seat?  
Whipping around quickly she found.....an empty, innocent back seat. Leaning over as far as she could to check, she still saw nothing. With a shaky laugh, she pushed down the clutch to turn on the car and crept to the intersection in first gear. It felt safer to be in the car, to be moving. There wasn’t any movement on the streets around her, and that made her feel better too. Her heart was still thudding, thickly, and she was hyper aware of everything around her as she drove.   
She didn’t stop in Elko for anything, not even gas and her tank was only three quarters full. Driving under I-80 on the way to Idaho Street she saw a crazy mess of crashed cars, one or two still smoking, and moving shapes. The way they moved, they weren’t police or EMTs or even healthy and getting out of town on any road that wasn’t that one was the only thing she could think of in her terrified state.  
She’d made it as far South as Eureka by late afternoon. She’d had to parallel highway 80 all the way to Carlin on dirt roads, the highway was dotted with crashes, but 278 down to Eureka had been empty. Creepy empty. The desert sand, blasted gold and white by the sun was reassuringly familiar for a Vegas girl, even if the scrubby pines and layers of bushes on the hills around town were not.  
A few of the people she was friendly enough to talk to in her core English class had told her they were from Eureka, and getting to someone at least partly familiar who might let her stay with them was the extent of her plan for today. The gas gauge had dipped to below a half tank, and she couldn’t even remember if she’d brought her wallet. Somehow she still thought that a debit card might get the pumps to work. The reality of what was happening still hadn’t completely set in. The only future she could imagine was going to Las Vegas to be with her family. Family meant safety.  
The sun was still above the horizon and the clock in her car said 4:35 when she turned off onto Main Street.  
The town was already broken apart, puzzle pieces of normal life peeking out from behind a screen of broken windows and crashed cars, and she realized she didn’t even know where her classmates lived. There were blood smears, especially outside Raine’s Market, but no bodies. There were no other cars moving. There were no people that she could see, dead or alive. She started shaking, and pulled over.  
It was too obvious that no kind policeman was going to come see if she was ok. No farmer in a dusty old Dodge was going to come ask if she had a flat. There might not even be anyone still alive to help her. When it had just been Elko, she’d been able to pretend that maybe THEY were only happening there. Maybe everywhere else was still normal. But THEY had been here too, and that meant it wasn’t just a random occurrence in one small town. Eureka was about as far from a major town as you could get. If THEY were here, it was everywhere.  
All the deaths, the extermination of everything that meant normality. It was a bit much for a girl whose ambition in life was to graduate from Great Basin Community College. A bit much for anyone, with any ambition. She felt like sitting here and crying, but the sun was definitely heading for the horizon now and the thought of staying here in her car all night made her very uneasy.   
Eureka was mostly a long street of sun bleached faux-Western store fronts, plunked down in steep, pine covered hills. Small side streets tangled around and back behind Main Street but they ended at those hills. It was enclosed, nowhere to run. She had to find somewhere safe to spend the night.  
Coasting aimlessly in neutral she tried to think of where would be secure. Somewhere high? Most of the buildings had second stories, but she didn’t know what was up there or how to get into them. Or what would be waiting inside for her if she went in to check.  
Panic was starting to set in when she found the Sheriff's’ station. Even though it was obviously empty it had a large, heavy duty front door, a fenced parking lot surrounded by barbed wire, the general look of a fortress. That spoke to her clearly in her frightened state.  
She parked across the street and looked at it for a while. Nothing was moving. But she’d have to go inside, and that meant getting out of the car, which she really didn’t want to do.  
Rooting around her for something to use to defend herself, she started to feel useless. She wasn’t stupid enough to get out of the car with nothing. Finally, she remembered the heavy duty metal flashlight her dad had put under the driver’s seat when they bought the car. It had to be at least 10 inches long, and it felt reassuringly solid. She had groaned and made a fuss about him being over protective when he’d told her she could use it to bash someone’s head in an emergency, and she’d give anything to have him in the passenger seat right now saying “I told you so.”  
Pocketing her keys she took a deep breath, and opened the door. The street was completely devoid of crazed psychos running out of hidden doorways at the sound of that click. Ok. As she stepped out of her car her heart started pounding, uncomfortably hard. She wanted to stay inside the safe, known confines of her car. She wanted to run straight inside the station but forced herself to walk. There was no way to know what she was running into.  
The windows were jagged gaping holes surrounded by shards of glass on the sidewalk that glimmered cruelly in the last rays of sunset. The cold breeze that only comes off the desert on a fall night was sneaking down the back of her shirt. She peered inside, flashlight held high in one hand.  
It looked empty. There was a big front room with a large desk taking up most of the space, a vending machine, some filing cabinets and a couple rows of plastic chairs flopped over like drunks after a hard night. An open doorway led into a back room, which also looked deserted.  
A sudden sound off to her right, the scrape of a footstep, made her gasp and jerk around. Her heart stopped. It was not Mr. Friendly Policeman. It was one of Them, an infected woman and there were two more with her, a block away.  
THEY lurched into a slow, stumbling run. She darted inside the station and slammed the door behind her. Thank God it still locked. She looked around wildly for something to use as a weapon. Nothing here, unless she wanted to throw a chair.  
She rushed into the back room. A couple cells, all empty, thank you God! An open closet with spilled boxes of toilet paper inside and some cleaning supplies. Nothing, nothing. What was she supposed to do, fling toilet paper at them? A hysterical laugh forced its way out of her mouth.  
THEY always find a window and they had already found it by the time she got a grip on herself and turned around. Her breath was coming in short, panicky gasps as she squeezed the flashlight and forced herself to run towards them. She had to get them while they were still hampered by the window. If they made it inside…She raised the flashlight high above her head, like she was going to chop wood. Shit, shit, shit.  
The first one was almost through the window, gashing herself up on the glass and not even caring, that crazy fixed grimace THEY all have on their face. It was the first time Maya had seen one of them up close, and it was terrifying. Mouth wide, lips pulled back in a sick menace of a grin, it’s a feral, animal look and THEY all, without fail, have it. It’s almost worse than the fact that THEY exist at all, or what THEY do, that horrible, disturbing grin.  
Maya brought the flashlight down as hard as she could, missing the head and hitting it where the shoulder joins the neck. It just shook it off and kept coming, trying to turn and bite Maya’s arm. Maya stepped back, aimed, and hit it in the head this time.  
She just kept pounding, and finally cracked the woman’s skull. It stopped moving, and fell limply against the window frame. She needed some sort of weapon! Something that could kill them from a distance. A gun would be ideal, of course, but she hadn’t thought of finding one when she left Elko. Stupid, stupid!  
The other two were shoving in right beside the first. One was stuck on some glass that was still in the frame, he’d almost parted his own head from his neck but he kept lunging in anyway. The other was almost halfway through. She concentrated on him, whacking until his head was a mess of splintered bone and goo.  
The flashlight glass had cracked, and it was covered in dark, almost black blood. She turned to the last one, breathing heavily, and saw that it couldn’t move, stuck on his impaled neck. He gaped at her, open mouthed, making mindless biting movements through his grin.  
She dropped the flashlight, grabbed one of the fallen chairs, and brought it down on the top of his head as hard as she could. It fell off his neck and landed on the floor with a stupid, wet thump. She whaled at it with the chair until it was an unrecognizable mess of mush. Then she backed away, shaking so hard she almost couldn’t grasp the flashlight when she bent to pick it up.   
The bodies lay there, draped over the broken window sills like grotesque decorations as she fought to get her breath back. Dark, thick, rusty brown fluid still dripped from their headless neck stumps like nightmare molasses. She checked herself quickly, finding spatters on the sleeves of her sweater and on her jeans but nowhere else.  
None of them were moving, and the air was full of a metallic, meaty smell that made her want to gag. It was finally too much. She sank down onto the floor, arms crossed over her head and the grimy flashlight dangling loosely out of one hand while she wailed. This couldn’t be happening. This just couldn’t be real!  
When she was finished, it was almost dark, and there were still corpses draped over the window. Her eyes were sore, she felt so exhausted it was like being drunk, and she was shaking all over, sticky with sweat. And she still had to make this place secure for the night.  
She couldn’t touch those things, she couldn’t! But she couldn’t sleep with them lying there all night either. She blinked dazedly and tried to think through the gray fog trying to take over her brain. Finally she turned around and remembered the back room.  
There was a connecting door between the front and the back, and it could shut. And, best of all, since the back room contained cells there were no windows back there.  
She grabbed a roll of paper towel from the storage closet, and used almost the entire thing wiping off the flashlight so she could see what she was doing while she shut and locked the door.  
It still didn’t feel safe. She dragged the desk in front of the door. Better. Digging in the desk drawers let her find the cell key. Thank God for small towns without enough budget for fancy cell doors that open and close with electric motors. She backed into the cleanest looking cell and locked the door behind her.  
Still not the safest feeling, but at least she could breathe again. She’d forgotten to bring in any food, but she was too sick from almost constant adrenaline to feel hungry for some dinner in any case. Too tired to stay awake, but too afraid to sleep, she spent the night sitting up on the cell bench drifting off and then jerking awake at every imagined sound, seeing the crazed snarling faces, the jagged patterns of shattered bone, over and over again. Only a little over two days, and she’d already forgotten what it felt like to be able to sleep without fear.


	3. Chapter 3

After what felt like eternity she felt calm enough to make some sort of plan for the day and then to get out. Better than sitting here in the dark clicking on the flashlight every few minutes, anyway. She shoved the desk out of the way and opened the door cautiously. The front room was empty. It was a surprise to see that it was barely dawn, she’d lost all track of time shut up in the back room with no windows and she'd left her phone in the pack in her car.  
THEY were even more disgusting looking draped through the windows in that fresh new light. She stared at them, waiting for a twitch, a sign that they were waiting to try to kill her again. Finally she made herself turn away.  
Thinking the building might have something useful, she rummaged in the desk drawers in the back room and found a little lock box in the back of the bottom drawer, the kind you put money in.  
It was unlocked, maybe someone had gotten into it recently. Inside were boxes of bullets with a black snake design on the covers. Where was the gun then? She searched the rest of the desk and found nothing else. Out in the front room, the long desk looked empty too, but she checked it just in case. Nothing. She kept the bullets anyway.  
Gingerly reaching out, she unlocked the front door and then threw it wide while she stepped back, holding the flashlight up and ready. Nothing there. She ran outside quickly, trying not to look to either side, and stopped when she reached her car, shivering convulsively.  
Looking again up and down the street showed no movement. No more of THEM, at least right here. With her back to the car, watching the street carefully, she put the bullet boxes down on top and rummaged in her pocket for the key. Before she got in, she checked the back seat. And then she drove out of town, way too fast, and headed East on highway 50. She thought a few shapes stumbled out onto the road after her at the very end of town by the high school but she didn’t want to turn around to check.  
There were no cars. This highway was pretty empty at the best of times, it wasn’t the fastest or most scenic way to anywhere. But, there were no cars. On one hand, that meant that no infected people had driven out here, crashed, and were now wandering around the desert waiting for a meal to break down on the highway.  
On the other hand, that meant absolutely no one to see, talk to, ask for help. Nothing, for mile after mile. It made her paranoid and afraid that somehow it was just her, the only human being left in a world full of flesh eaters. It was a possibility she could barely stand to think about, but it kept intruding. Where were other people? Surely someone else was trying to get away, just like her?  
When she wasn’t chewing over that terrifying thought, she was staring at the gas gauge as it slowly crept down, from a half tank down towards a quarter, relentlessly. What was she going to do? What could she do when it hit empty?  
The highway stretched on with no other cars, no sign of life. The emptiness preyed on her mind. Where was everyone? Already eaten? Ok brain, thanks for that. If that’s how you’re going to behave I’m turning you off for a while.  
She drove and drove, waiting tensely for something to happen. Would there be a crash in the road? What would she do if she got to one that blocked the whole road? She was grateful not to find out, especially since at least four of Them, attracted by the noise of the car, stumbled out onto the highway near Ruth. They were easy to avoid, but it jerked her heart into her throat every time, left her sweaty and tense.  
The empty highway was still terrifying, but now she felt the new worry that if she had to get out of her car she would immediately be surrounded. What would she do then though? Run into the desert? She glanced at the gas gauge again. Hovering, a millimeter above empty. Could she make it to Ely?  
As it turned out, she could. Another one of Them stumbled out onto the road and fell, just as she drove into town. Driving was too noisy, it attracted Them.  
There was no time to react, to plan, it was pure luck that it tumbled right in front of her car. It had been a man, in jeans and a gray shirt.  
A huge THUD jolted her up in her seat, the car jumped up like she’d just gone over a rock, and she let out an involuntary shriek. She stomped on the brake and felt the car stall, looking in the rear view mirror. She had hit it right in the head, smashed it into the road.  
Maya wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh, or start sobbing. She did neither, just started the car again and drove, looking for a gas station. Finally she saw a Dinoco, and turned into it, stopping neatly in front of the closest tank. She checked carefully for more of THEM before she got out, went to the gas cap, and opened it.  
But the pump was dead. Nothing on the screen, no Insert Card or Pay Inside. No instructions. Punching a few of the buttons on the screen did absolutely nothing. Shaking it produced zero results. She picked up the spigot and tried the handle a few times, holding it down and letting it go. No gas came out. She stared at it, completely at a loss. How did these things work? How were you supposed to get gas if the pump wasn’t on?  
Her mind wasn’t working too clearly. The end of the world, society, life as it had been; she could wrap her mind around it somehow. No more Facebook ever…..Ok, she had wasted too much time on there anyway. Not another McDonald’s hamburger for the rest of her life. That was healthier, which could be a good thing. Hordes of crazy, grinning meat-eaters out to get her that would require more head smashing destruction. Not great, but a fact that would have to be dealt with.  
But the complete and total inability to think of some way to put gas in her empty car was what finally made it too much to cope with. How could she think rationally when there was no way in the world to take the gallons and gallons of gas sitting nicely in their tanks under those neat little round metal covers and put them in her car?  
She was so out of it she wasn’t careful like she should have been and pretty much walked into a group, four, maybe five, while she was wandering around the gas tanks trying to think of what to do. The sight of them shocked her back into full consciousness like a slap of cold water and she ran, trying desperately to think of a place to defend, somewhere high or with a door to lock.  
She pelted down main street with THEM right behind, and felt utter despair when she saw another person shape standing down the street in front of her. She thought for a minute it was another one and knew she was trapped and was going to die. Then the person turned around and she moved like a real person, not jerky, with a gun already raised. Maya started to hope that she might live through this after all.  
Her savior was outside the grocery store on main street. Maya barely had time to understand that she wasn’t going to attack her when she heard a shout to get down. She hit the street so fast she slid down the road a little, while the woman shot down the group following her. Two bullets to each, straight in the head. Even as panicked as she was Maya could admire her aim.  
Shaking and still in shock, she got up and wobbled over to where the woman was standing by a beat-up white GMC. Two men had come out to see what the shooting was about, but when they saw that it was taken care of they disappeared back inside the store quickly to keep stocking up.  
The woman looked at her intently. She seemed older, maybe mid thirties, with thick blond hair and brown eyes. Her sky blue jeans and plaid shirt screamed rancher, to Maya.  
“You hurt?” Maya shook her head.  
“You’re not infected.” It wasn’t really a question, but she shook her head anyway, agreeing with the woman.  
“Are you from here?” She shook her head.  
The woman smiled a little and asked “Do you talk?” Maya nodded.  
After a few seconds while the woman’s smile grew bigger Maya finally got it and said, out loud, “Yes. I’m Maya Jimenez. I’m from Elko. Thanks for saving me.”  
“I’m Jeannie.”  
Newly introduced, Jeannie sighed, looking like she didn’t really want to be saying this but her conscience wouldn’t let her do anything else, and added, “You can go in and look for supplies, if you need some.”  
Maya felt a huge mix of conflicting emotions, relief at finally finding other people and nausea uppermost. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” And then she bent over and threw up, right in the street in front of them.


	4. Chapter 4

Jeannie looked like she wanted to change her mind, right there, but she was kind enough not to say so. When Maya had finished she wiped her arm across her mouth, shivering a little.  
“I’ve got a car, back there. There’s some food in it and stuff, that’s not the problem. The problem is it’s out of gas, and I was trying to fill it but...the pumps don’t work and then I ran into that group and....Thank you again Jeannie.”  
“We can show you how to get some gas into it before you go.”  
“That would help. I had no idea how to….what? Before I go?” Maya half smiled, studying the woman’s face intently, looking for the signs it was a joke. “You want me to just leave?”  
Jeannie’s face was a strange mix of shame and determination. “There aren’t many people left here. We talked about it and decided we’re going to have to make this town work for years off what’s here. We can’t start taking in every person who makes it this far, we’ll run out of food in a month.”  
Maya just stood there, dumbfounded, and tried to think. It was so hard to form a reply, when she was exhausted and shaking and still had the taste of vomit in her mouth. But something seemed wrong here.  
“You mean...out of this whole town there’s just the three of you and you think you’re going to run out of food if I stay? I haven’t seen one other alive person since I drove here from Elko. Not one. You’re not going to be flooded with refugees here.”  
Jeannie’s face lost its traces of shame, eclipsing it with pure resolve. “We can’t make exceptions. And there aren’t just three of us, there are more that stayed back at the house. We have to look after ourselves. Look, Maya, I saved your life. We’re willing to let you have some gas and supplies before you move on, but you have to go.”  
Maya stood there, thinking it over. She wanted to get to Las Vegas. She wanted to find her family. These people were going to let her have some gas to do it.  
She was glad to have found people, to know that she wasn’t the only non-infected person left in Nevada, but it made her feel defeated and depressed, how quickly the world had shifted into survival mode. It was probably best to take the offer before Jeannie started calculating how long the gas would last.  
She sighed. “Yeah. Sure, I get it. I’ll take whatever you can spare. I’m trying to get to Vegas anyway, that’s where my family is….where they were, I mean.”  
Jeannie jerked a little, in surprise it seemed like. “Vegas? You think it’s smart to go there? There were millions of people there!”   
Since she was totally out of energy, out of ideas, and functioning through a base level of extreme stress with occasional spikes of near-death panic, Maya’s common sense had taken a quick break. She didn’t care that she was deliberately trying to get to a place where there would be hordes of Them, not just three or four at a time. It hadn’t even occurred to her.   
All she wanted was to get to her family. She was acting on pure, stubborn instinct now, and built into her from the center out was the rock solid base that was her family. She needed them, now more than ever. If they were in a place surrounded by thousands of infected crazies it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to them.  
Of course, she was too junked out on adrenaline crash right now to form real thoughts about this to reply to Jeannie. The woman was kicking her out of town anyway, why should she care where Maya chose to go afterwards? So she settled for saying simply “My family is there. I’m going to find them.”  
Jeannie stared at her with her mouth open for a few more seconds, then shrugged. “Ok. Your funeral. We’ll get you started with that gas.”  
Indicating the direction with a wave, Jeannie led the way. Briefly, she stuck her head inside the store to tell her companions where she was going and one came out to keep watch since she wouldn’t be there. Other than that, they walked in silence.  
Maya was starting to realize how hungry she was. She hadn’t eaten yet today she hadn’t even thought of it. The last food she’d had was some ritz crackers, fruit cocktail, and the last of her cheese before she left her apartment, yesterday morning. Her stomach was twisting painfully, reminding her she hadn’t eaten in too long.  
Finally, they stopped at another gas station. The covers had been pried off the gas tanks in the ground and some sort of hose system now poked out from the central point of what looked like a generator, creeping across the ground , to spawn little red gas cans.  
Jeannie grabbed one of these and handed it to Maya to carry as they started back down the way they had just come towards Maya’s little green Kia. The gas sloshed against the plastic with each step, a reassuring sound.  
Finally, Maya dredged up a question that had been nagging at her.  
“Hey, Jeannie?”  
“Hmm?”  
“You guys don’t have an extra gun, by any chance? I don’t have one. I used the flashlight from my car last time I needed something, but a gun would be better. Please?”  
She didn’t want to sound too pathetic, but the thought of driving into Vegas and finding huge crowds of infected crazies wouldn’t leave the back of her mind. A gun wouldn’t save her if the swarm was big enough, but it would help. It would be better than nothing, which was what she had at the moment. She was desperate.  
Jeannie walked in silence for a while, debating with herself probably. Then she shrugged.  
“Yeah. We actually have a lot more guns than we have people right now. And I’ll feel a lot better about sending you into Vegas if I know I at least gave you one. Could you use a shotgun? A papoose?”  
Blinking, Maya considered. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but she’d never shot anything bigger than a .22 and that not since she’d gone shooting with her dad and her tios 3 or 4 years ago. Could she even load a shotgun? And what the hell was a papoose?  
“I don’t--, I’m not sure. I’ve never shot anything big. I just need something easy to use.”  
“A Glock then.” She caught Maya’s look of incomprehension and tried to simplify. “A 9mm.” Maya continued staring. “A hand gun. Like the police have in a movie” Jeannie mimed holding up both arms, left hand cupping the right palm, and Maya nodded.  
“If it’s easy to load I could definitely use that. Thank you, so much.”  
Jeannie looked at her seriously for a moment, then said grimly “You’ll need it.”  
**  
After Ely Maya took highway 6 for a while, eating some of the nutrigrain bars out of her pack one handed as she drove, and then turned off at the intersection onto the 318. Staying on Highway 50 would have taken her onto the 93 which led straight to Highway 15 and Las Vegas, but she was wary of using the better known highways with more towns on them until there was no alternative.  
She would still have to get on 93 eventually but she knew a dirt side road by Love’s travel stop at the intersection with 15 that should get her into North Vegas where she knew the side streets, knew how to get around the highway. It was where her family lived. Their apartment was close to Nellis Air Force base, where her father worked as a janitor. After that, she had no plan.  
Outside of Lund, after endless miles and miles of nothing Maya got a shock that nearly made her crash. She had just gone past one of the little sun-bleached ranch houses that appear out of nowhere on rural Nevada highways, there if you’re looking and then gone when you blink. Suddenly a shot rang out and the side mirror shattered into glittery fragments.  
Her hands jerked on the wheel, sending her right across the road, and she had to yank it back hard to correct. Swerving back the car dipped onto the right shoulder, thought about fishtailing, then the tires gripped, held, and kept going.  
She glanced in the rear view mirror, just half a second, and saw a running figure, a blur of waving arms and a raised shape that looked like a rifle. She pressed the accelerator and sped up. Why had they shot at her? What was she doing to them, just driving?  
It was getting later and later in the afternoon, and now she had to figure out what she would do for the night. She was surrounded by what she thought of as typical Nevada highway scenery, which was nothing. Dark rocks and gray dirt and dust with mile after mile of silvery green sagebrush. Small brown and gray mountains and ridges followed by a dip down into endless, flat while dusty valleys. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to be safe.  
Where could she sleep out here? Could one of those things crash through her car windows? Were they that strong? The one back in Elko, the one that had killed the cop…...yes. It had gotten through the windshield. So her car wasn’t safe.  
Trying to think of a solution, she just kept driving. Then she saw a sign for the Kirch Wildlife Management area. It seemed like a good idea. She could turn off the highway, at least, find somewhere to park. Maybe on top of the hills that the road led to. At least if she was high up she could see anything coming. For a while. While it was light. Sighing, she turned the wheel and started off down the graded dirt road.


	5. Chapter 5

After more miles than she liked of windy, bumpy dirt and creosote bushes, she reached the top of the ridge and a surprise. There were houses here. Three or four little roads with a scattering of houses and signs saying things like “Cottontail Lane” and “Badger Pass”. Cute. She grimaced.  
Nothing moved. She drove around the entire place twice, and saw no one. Even more encouraging, nothing came lurching out at the sound of her engine. All of the vehicles seemed to be gone, or at least she saw very few. It looked like everyone here had bugged out.  
Only a few of the houses had a fence, and only one house was fenced all the way around. With the sun now dipping closer and closer to the hills far in front of her to the west, she decided that the fence made it an attractive place to hole up for the night.  
The door was unlocked, so she threw it open and stepped back, her brand new gun up and ready. No infected thing appeared. Still, she entered with extreme caution, ready to shoot. She only had to guess wrong once, and that would be one time too many.  
Jeannie had shown her how to load the clip, and informed her that the boxes of bullets she’d found in Eureka were actually the right kind for her gun. She had made sure Maya knew how to turn the safety on and off, how to fire it, and then filled up her car and sent her on her way with wishes for good luck. It seemed those wishes were working. The house was empty.  
**  
After two days in the little whatever-it-was community, Maya discovered how hard it was to make herself leave. At first, she had told herself she was looking for anything she could use. It was even true, and she found lots of useful stuff. Blankets and sweatshirts, good thick boots, and a nice ranch style jacket that had tough, thick canvas material. She kept worrying about one of those things being close enough to try to bite, it just made sense to have as much cover as you could. She also practiced getting her Colt out of the jacket pocket quickly and thumbing the safety on and off. She didn't want to waste the bullets practicing firing it, but she could at least try to make getting it out a smooth, instinctive motion.  
There was also some more food. A lot of cupboards were empty, the people leaving had been thorough, but she still found bits and pieces here and there. The taps worked in most of the houses; she would get a few minutes of water and then it would shut off. It was enough to refill her water bottles at least, and she wasted one whole bottle on washing her hair. The greasy feeling of dirty hair was something she absolutely hated.  
She wished she knew more about well systems and how they worked. Actually, there were a lot of things she wished she knew more about, apocalypse survival methods being right at the top of the list. Her most valuable find was a book about Nevada plant life and ecosystems that focused on the Great Basin Desert. She needed to know more about the plants around her than just their names. What she needed now was to know what she could use, which ones were edible and what could be deadly, and she didn’t have the luxury of Google anymore.  
Eventually, she had to face the fact that she just didn’t want to leave this safe place. It was still hard to sleep at night. Before even trying to close her eyes every night she had to barricade herself in a windowless bathroom of the house with the fence that she had made her base for now, with the door thoroughly blocked. But she was almost calm during the day, after she had explored every house and made sure she was alone here. It was hard to force herself to go. In just over a week she had come to treasure that feeling of being safe opening the door to walk outside, a feeling she used to take for granted in her old life.   
Her family was a siren song in the back of her mind, fighting against the instinct to stay in this relative safety. She took another day to go through all of the houses again, making sure she had everything she thought she could use in her car. Anything that seemed to have a weapon-like quality she took, although there were no guns or ammunition she found plenty of things to use as blunt objects.  
Finally, there were no more excuses to stay. No more water came out when she turned any of the faucets, inside or out. Her heart was heavy as she drove out of the little town that had been her safe haven, wondering what terror would be waiting for her in Las Vegas.


	6. Chapter 6

Entering Las Vegas was a strange mix of familiarity and disconcerting strangeness. The view was nearly the same as always, grey dirt, grey hills, and the seemingly endless vista of houses-malls-apartments-houses that always surprised people driving in from the North because they were too far away to even see the famous casinos on the strip yet. In daylight, the city always looked faded and depressing, the glitter and lights stripped away by the sun and only the faded bones left.  
The unfamiliar part of the view, the part that sent her heart up into her throat, was the smoke still pouring black into the sky like chimneys on the horizon and the broken buildings, a few burnt down to nothing while others just had broken window shards gaping like teeth, leering at her as she drove by. Getting this far into the city had required a lot of off road driving that her poor little Kia wasn’t really built for, slaloming from side to side around burnt out wrecks and crashes where people had obviously also tried to avoid the highway and failed to avoid each other. It must have been crazy, complete chaos, while the worst of this was going on.   
On Ellsworth avenue, trying to parallel Las Vegas boulevard, she ran into something her tiny car would never get over, or around. Letting the car stop, she turned it off and stared out the windshield at the devastation before her. Just in front of O’Callaghan Federal Medical Center the road was gone. The buildings were gone. It looked like something out of a movie, an old one about Vietnam or Desert Storm.   
Gaping craters poked all the way down to the pipes underneath the street, mounds of scorched rubble had collapsed into piles, all that was left of the buildings that used to be here. The power lines had been blown down like so many snapped matchsticks. And, worst of all, a few bits of body parts were still spread at the edges of the craters, swollen and ripped apart but still vaguely recognizable with distinctive blackish edges, rather than reddish. Although the inside of her car with sun baking through the windows was warm, she felt a cold thrill up the base of her spine. There had been a war here.  
Nellis Air Force base was basically across the street from the hospital. It didn’t take much imagination to see the planes getting called out, dropping some payloads on the horrors swarming up the boulevard. The hospital must have been full of infected for some reason, enough that this response had seemed like a good idea. She wondered if it had worked, if Las Vegas was safe. If her family was safe.  
Nothing moved in front of her but the dust, whenever the wind kicked up.   
This looked like the point where she left her car. She checked and double checked her backpack, making sure she had everything she wanted to take in case she couldn’t get back here. Her family’s apartment was almost 5 miles away from here, at the corner of Walnut and Geist, and she didn’t know what would be between her and it. Her Glock was in the pocket of her rescued jacket, loaded and ready to go, ammunition in the other pocket.   
Getting out of her car made her start shaking in earnest, although she knew being inside it was a false security at best. The first step away from it was the hardest, a tearing wrench at leaving what had been her safe haven for the last crazy week.  
She felt oddly dislocated as she crept over and around piles of rubble and between buildings. The boulevard was so chewed up, she had to detour a long way down Ellsworth into the base to even try to start heading South. It was almost like she was watching herself moving from above, a character in a post-apocalypse movie, apart and involved all at the same time. She couldn’t suppress the persistent feeling that a movie crew would show up, point out the hidden cameras, and congratulate her for her realistic acting. Really well done, you seemed so genuinely scared!  
Every little sound made her jerk, and the scrape of an empty big gulp cup across a parking lot jolted her into a run before she realized it wasn’t a threat. Slowing down, she had even managed to smile a little at herself when she heard more sounds behind her, soft scrapes and thuds. Her heart sinking down into her feet she turned around, slowly.  
This was bad. This was the worst it could have been. There was a whole pack of them, already reaching their arms out even though they were yards away, grasping at the air, grins gaping open at her. Tattered and grayish, missing an arm here, half of a face there, dressed in the rags of hospital gowns, jeans and Tshirts, one or two even buck naked, they packed the street behind her from edge to edge. Dios mio, ayudame!  
The only thing she could do was run and so she did, across the street and through a little grass park area, going flat out. They weren’t as fast as her, but they would just keep coming. Passing an alleyway on the other side of the park she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and a gasp tore sharply at her throat. She dodged away, even though she was already on the other side of the street, because there was one crawling out of the alley, creeping like some bloated slug, dragging across the ground.   
She needed somewhere to hide that they couldn’t get to, or somewhere high enough that they couldn’t reach her while she shot them. The fear was there, a feeling she had grown used to in the last week, an acid taste at the back of her throat. But this time she was able to lock it down and look around her as she ran, calculating, thinking about which option would be the best. Her backpack thumped heavily against her with every stride.   
Ahead of her a large building complex came into view with a parking lot surrounding it. She thought it might be the base community college. And standing prominently out in the middle of the parking lot, shining bright like a blessing in the strong October sun, was a huge, lifted, Dodge cummins diesel. Definitely something one of the Nellis active service kids would have. She altered course and ran for it, jumping the concrete parking barriers.   
Getting up the back and into the bed took seconds, and she clambered up onto the top of the cab, cracking her shin on the edge painfully. Dropping her pack at her feet, she took a minute to check around and behind her. She couldn’t even see the crowd that had been following her. But they would be coming. Oh yes.  
Trying to slow down her breathing, she checked that her glock was loaded and thumbed the safety off. Hopefully she had enough bullets, there hadn’t really been time to stop and count the number of Them. Her heart was pounding so hard her fingers shook in rhythm with it and she felt icy, numb. Taking deep, slow breaths, she got the three small boxes of ammunition she had found in Eureka out of her jacket pocket and set them next to her on the cab roof. The faster ones were tumbling over the edge of the parking lot now, still just a bit too far away. She wasn’t sure how accurate she would be and she wanted them closer before she started shooting.   
Time froze and she felt hyper aware of everything, the way the cold breeze feathered her hair, the glare off the white roof beneath her, the smell of rubble dust that hung lightly in the air. The first one was close enough now, and she raised the gun the way Jeannie had showed her, left hand cupping her right palm. She fired. It was mildly surprising to her when it hit exactly where she had been aiming and the infected flopped over. Three more were right behind him though, she didn’t have time to think, just to act.  
Three more shots but only one of them fell, the second and third shots missed the head. The recoil was light, but she still had to adjust for it. The crowd was thicker behind the front runners now, but she ignored that to pick her targets, focused, aiming. Two more shots, and two went down. Either the gun was easier to use than she had hoped, or she had a talent for accuracy that she hadn’t known about.  
They were almost to the truck now, but even the tallest of them couldn’t begin to reach the top of the cab. She felt a fierce rush of pleasure, mentally thanking whoever had wanted to lift his truck so ridiculously high. It must have cost a lot. And it had saved her life.  
It was almost too easy. They crowded around the cab, banging into the doors and falling over each other as they tried to reach up for her, and now that they were so close she only had to point the Glock down at the closest head and shoot. The next nine shots didn’t miss once, they were so close, and then she had to re-load. The little green and white box still looked full to bursting, even after grabbing out handfuls for the clip, and she felt calmer just looking at all the bullets glinting in the sun. Unless a fresh crowd of infected surged out of nowhere, she should have enough.  
Her clip held 15 rounds, and with her second load she hit all but one of the infected crowding around the truck. They moved around a lot, but it was still almost like target practice. The crowd was definitely thinning out. One more re-load, and this time she missed twice.   
Doing some quick math, she figured she must have shot almost 40 of them, and there were still ten or so crowded around the truck. One of her boxes of ammunition was nearly empty, just a handful of bullets rolling loosely around the bottom, but she had two more. And what happens when you keep running into groups this big and those two boxes run out? The thought nagged, and she shook her head irritably, pushing it away. There was still shooting to do before she was really safe, this was not the time to get distracted about a future that might or might not happen.   
Now that there were less of Them it was easier to see each one distinctly. The sun glaring down lit their disgusting, ragged faces so clearly that she had to stop shooting for a second or two, shivering convulsively. They were so wrong, such a violation of everything natural, grasping up at her, gaping mindlessly. They still looked like humans, and that was what made them so terrible to her.  
Finally there was only one left, a tall woman with dark skin, missing most of the right side of her face and right arm, a few strands of dark hair clinging to her scalp. Maya took careful aim and shot her right between the eyes. Her muscles wanted to sag with relief, and her forearms ached from holding up the gun for so long. Now that the immediate danger was over, she became aware of how nauseated she was. Apparently it was her default reaction to extreme stress and fear. Great.  
Leaning over carefully with a hand pressed against her stomach, she checked the ground all around the cab. None of the bodies piled around the truck were moving.   
“Looks like you’re finished.”  
Her sigh of relief turned into a muffled scream, and she twisted around so fast she had to sit or fall off the cab.

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the same universe as The Walking Dead and follows most of the same rules, but there will be non-canon bits and the main characters aren't going anywhere near Georgia so don't expect Rick Grimes or his crew to show up!


End file.
